


Touchstone

by PhosphorescentBlue



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 02:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5851126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PhosphorescentBlue/pseuds/PhosphorescentBlue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She will be free and she will go <em>home</em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Touchstone

**Author's Note:**

> I have another WIP that would be so easy to finish. Instead, I wrote this. Because I like to live on the edge. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! I hope you all enjoy it!

She fights them the entire way.

The commander’s guards muscle Clarke into a room, shoving her to her knees when they reach the middle of the cell. Small growls of rage rumble in her throat and she struggles against the hold of the two, stronger men. A firm hand pushing between her shoulder blades has her pitching forward and she only catches herself on her hands at the last second. The guards leave her there without a backward glance, slamming the door shut.

Her voice hoarse, Clarke pauses in her tirade long enough to hear the snick of a lock tumbling into place. Instantly, the fight goes out of her.  

Weary, she studies her prison cell, empty save for a cot covered with some sort of pelt. Dim light filters through a small window high above the bed, and she stumbles over, finding enough strength to leap onto the flimsy cot. Her bloody, aching fingers scrabble on the window ledge to pull herself up enough to look outside.

For nearly eighteen years, she lived in a space station, looking down on the blue marbled surface of earth. She thought such an upbringing would make any fear of heights impossible. She is not prepared for the dizzying sensation of vertigo that sweeps over her as she stares, awestruck and dismayed, from her perch in a high tower. Though she cannot see directly down, she knows she’s hundreds of meters above the ground right now.

“Help,” she whispers at the glass, her reflection blurry in its leaded waves.

It’s the only self-pity she allows herself as her eyes dart over what can only be Polis, and she is soon distracted by voices outside of her cell.  Flinging herself back across the room, she tugs on the door, only to find it holds firm.  Soon, the voices have faded away entirely, leaving her to prowl the perimeter of the cell, trying the doorknob with each pass, as if it might have a different result.

Lexa knows better than to stash her anywhere easily escaped, and Clarke’s complete lack of bearings prohibit her from devising any sort of escape strategy.

The sun was waning when Roan brought her into the tower. Now, it sets in earnest. It pitches her room into darkness, and when she weakly pulls herself up for one more look out the window, she sees the small glows of fires, so far below her on the ground.

As no sounds come through the cell door, a weary loneliness sets over her. She moves off of the bed and presses her back to the wall, sliding down to the floor.  Closing her eyes and resting her forehead on her raised knees, Clarke finally dwells on how, just a few short hours ago, she’d felt the first burst of happiness in such a long time.

She lifts a hand to her cheek, tracing the path that she’d felt Bellamy’s fingers take as he stroked her hair away from her face, the slight scrape of his fingertip as he’d gently pulled the gag out of her mouth.

She remembers the way his dark eyes had scanned her face as he touched her.  She recalls the uptilt of his lips, too busy exhaling three months of held breaths to be a real smile.

She listens to his relieved words, the only he’d gotten to say. “I’m going to get you out of here.” Pressure builds behind her eyes, tears and cries wanting to escape her as she plays the whisper over and over again in her mind.

So close to absolution. So close to Bellamy.

And she thinks about the gut-swooping terror she’d felt, mingled with the distress that she’d had to force her gaze away from his when she caught Roan’s movement out of the corner of her eye. She knows she should be glad that she was able to save Bellamy with her warning cry. She knows if she’d not seen the attack coming, that he would be dead now.  But it is one more charge against Prince Roan of the Ice Nation.

Not only did he harm Bellamy, the extent of which she can only guess. Not only did he take her captive as a bartering chip. Not only had he struck her and wrestled her and held her at knife-point.

Not only those things. But Roan had taken precious seconds that she could have looked at his face. Somehow, though she’d left it three months ago, he’d taken her away from her home.

Bellamy is her home. She isn’t sure how. She can’t quite determine the parts of the whole that make him so, that make him her touchstone. All she knows is that from the moment she saw Roan move in behind him, she’d seen a terrifying, alternate outcome. One where Bellamy lay dead at her feet and the darkness she’s worked so hard to offset would consume her whole.

Even though she managed to save him—at least as much as she could, considering his subsequent injuries at Roan’s hands—Clarke continues to see this even now. She sees it as her burning eyes slowly shut and the hot tears dribbling down her face slow and finally stop.  She sees a world where Bellamy is out of reach and impossible to recover.

She doesn’t have any words to explain the ache in her chest at the mere thought.

It’s only when sleep fully takes her that the nightmare is replaced by a dream.  
  


* * *

“You need a haircut,” Raven says blandly.

Clarke looks up from the tools she’s been sterilizing in a cast iron pot over a fire. “Why?”

“You look like you’re having a fight with Medusa’s snakes. It keeps curling around your arms and you get all huffy and start batting at it like an angry kitten.”

“I’ll just pop over to the salon on C deck, then, shall I? I wonder if Indra will be there so we can gossip.”

An unimpressed eyebrow arching is the only response she receives from her friend, and Clarke grins, satisfied that she’s somehow won this battle.

“You watched way too many vids on the Ark,” Raven finally replies, disgusted. “I was going to offer to cut it for you, but if you like it getting in your way, by all means.” She pushes herself to her feet, a regretful shrug jerking her shoulders upward.

Laughing, Clarke hops to her feet. “Okay, okay. Please, Raven—”

“My Queen,” Raven interrupts.

“Please, _my_ _Queen_ , will you cut my hair for me?”

Raven nods regally. “I will do my best with my trusty, sharpened shard of dropship. Only the best tools for you.” Clarke is too busy smiling fondly to notice her friend’s eyes moving over her shoulder, until she says, “Oh, look, Bellamy’s home.”

Clarke whips around, eyes searching the people who’ve just streamed in through the camp’s gates until she spots him.

She flips off Raven, who is chortling gleefully at Clarke’s “complete lack of chill”, without tearing her eyes off of him as he branches off from the others, moving in her general direction.

She can tell the moment he sees her. He doesn’t draw up short or anything so cliché. But he does smile at her. And as he draws closer and closer to her, her own smile welcomes him.

* * *

  
She opens her eyes to her dark prison. The tower is quiet now and slight streaks of pink are starting to spread across the sky.

The sun will rise soon, and with it, she is certain, will come Lexa and her guards. They will try to get something from her and Clarke will be ready. She will be strong, because she has no choice but to be. She will do what she does best: survive. Not only that, but she’ll escape. She won’t be a pawn for anyone ever again.

She will be free and she will go _home_.


End file.
